"Boom boom boom boom, I’m gonna shoot you right down, right off your feet. Take you home with me. Put you in my house.”

Anniversaries so often fly by once you’re a certain age. We’ve belted through the twentieth¹ anniversaries of all of the first revived series of Doctor Who, and thus the debuts of the Ninth and Tenth Doctors, in something of a haze this year. Which is how I missed the twentieth anniversary of the episode of Doctor Who, the title of which you’ll find at the top of this email. This is the eleventh episode of the 2005 series of Doctor Who, which was something I’d intended to mark in this newsletter, for reasons that I hope will become clear as we go.

By this point in the 2005 season I had just about got used to Doctor Who being back. The commission of two more seasons and two more Christmas specials was already months in the past. We were all in this for the long haul and having seen most of the season, we could all be 100% confident we were in the safe hands of Russell T Davies and his team for the foreseeable future. On the night of The Empty Child I dared leave the house on the day of transmission for the first time, on the night of Boom Town I did so again.